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language: English
country: USA
year: 1918
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy, horror
dates read: 14.2.23-17.2.23
obviously in its basic premise — there is an Aztec god who is pure evil — and in its investment in racial categories (seen particularly in the racial ambiguity of the people of Tlapallan) Francis Stevens’s The Citadel of Fear is unquestionably racist. having said that, I think it presents an interesting contrast to, say, Lovecraft in its insistence that Kennedy’s obsession with wealth and power, his (colonial, racist) sense of superiority and feeling that it’s his right to take whatever he wants from Tlapallan, is what leads him directly into the metaphorical arms of Nacoc-Yaotl — that is, it’s bad.
by the same token, it seems like there’s an unexpected and probably unintended reparative-ish reading of his destruction of Tlapallan and (claimed) assumption of Nacoc-Yaotl’s power, especially since Biornson specifically and explicitly contrasts this with the priests in Tlapallan: given the (colonialist) premise that there is An Evil Aztec God, what we learn from this is that the Indigenous people who have been aware of that god forever are able to manage, contain, and/or appease it in order to limit or mitigate the impact of that evil, but as soon as a white American guy shows up he destroys their carefully balanced system and ends up risking the destruction of the world.
I don’t think that this is the intended reading, and I don’t think it outweighs the fundamental issues with the novel’s world-building, but I do think there’s something there, however unintentional.
this was one of the most interesting books books I’ve read this year [in 2023] — not necessarily good, certainly not the way The Theory of Flight or The Spear Cuts Through Water are good, but fascinating in the weirdness of its handling of the “Aztec” stuff. it’s all the more weird because as the book goes on it becomes more and more apparent that all of the “Aztec” things are essentially reskinned pseudo-Celtic stuff; this becomes clear at the climax when Tlaloc (e.g.) is explicitly equated with Neptune (sure, Francis) and then with “Mananan, son of that great one [i.e., Lir] who dwells forever invisible in the Slieve Fuad”. the fact that two of the protagonists — Colin O’Hara and his sister Cliona Rhodes — are Irish immigrants emphasizes this: both are explicitly able to integrate the supernatural phenomena they’re encountering into their conceptions of the world on the basis of an assumed “Celtic” spirit that links them to the supernatural.
I’ve been thinking all week that maybe it made sense to think of the appropriation of Indigenous or pseudo-indigenous signifiers as an additional origin strand for fantasy, but this book, at least, strongly suggests to me that it’s another, more “exotic” offshoot of Celticism.
anyway, this was a really compelling read and I’m looking forward to exploring Stevens’s work in more detail in the future.
moods: adventurous, dark, mysterious, tense